Lights-out looms for Avenue Cartier lampshades amid arts funding crunch
Lights-out looms for Avenue Cartier lampshades amid arts funding crunch
Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter
editor@qctonline.com
The 34 giant lampshades on Avenue Cartier, which have displayed a range of works by Quebec artists since 2014, may eventually have to be taken down due to a lack of funding from the Ville de Québec, according to the Société de développement commercial (SDC) Montcalm. The SDC Montcalm and the Musée national des Beaux-Arts du Québec (MNBAQ) have piloted the project, called Lumière sur l’art, since its inception, with funding from the Ville de Québec major events bureau.
The current funding agreement ended in 2024. SDC Mont- calm director general Marie Langlois told the QCT that the major events bureau had indicated it was only able to provide 20 per cent of the funding needed for the project to go ahead.
Jean-Étienne Billette is the president of the SDC Montcalm and the owner of the Fastoche sandwich shop and adjoining burger restaurant in Les Halles Cartier. “The [major events office] has let us know that our funding has been reduced to a minimal portion of what we received in the past,” he said. “We learned at the beginning of the summer that they intended to reduce our funding. We spoke with them, and we also spoke with [city councillors] David Weiser and Mélissa Coulombe-Leduc, but things didn’t move forward.
“Any equipment that is ex- posed to the outdoors is expensive [to maintain] and we have to pay the artists,” said Billette. He said the SDC is not eligible for additional grants and is hesitant to explore private sponsorship options. “We want to save Lumière sur l’art.”
Billette said the lampshades, which have displayed art by Group of Seven artists, local con- temporary artists, high school students and people recovering from mental health struggles over the years, have brightened up the street and become a tourist attraction in their own right. “Especially in winter, they’re really pretty.”
City spokesperson Jean-Pascal Lavoie said the city needed more information before making a decision on the future of the project. “The City of Quebec wants Avenue Cartier to continue to benefit from its own visual signature. However, before committing to a new agreement, we want to ensure the safety of the lighting structures. These structures belong to the SDC. Since the lifespan of the lighting structures supporting the lampshades was initially estimated at five years and they were installed in 2015, the City asked the SDC Montcalm … to produce an engineer’s report to assess their condition. We believe an engineer’s assessment of the structures would be appropriate in order to determine their lifespan and see if the financial support should be revised, in addition to assessing the costs associated with repairing or replacing the structures,” he said. Langlois said tests would be carried out by an engineer in February.
“All parties are looking for solutions so that Avenue Cartier continues to benefit from its own visual signature,” Lavoie said, echoing similar statements by the MNBAQ and a spokesperson for Coulombe-Leduc and Weiser.
On Jan. 21, the SDC Montcalm launched an online petition to call on the city to provide $400,000 in funding over the next five years to keep the lamps lit. Nearly 600 people had signed it as of this writing.
Arts funding fragile
Lumière sur l’art is not the only local artistic initiative that is on thin ice due to lack of funding. Both the Théâtre de la Bordée and Robert Lepage’s Ex Machina, the resident theatre company at Le Diamant, have announced cuts to in-house productions in recent weeks. Clément Turgeon, artistic director of Le Festif!, a major summer music festival in Baie-Saint-Paul in the Charlevoix region, has expressed concerns about the festival’s future, although he expects this year’s edition to go ahead. Between inflation and smaller-than-usual government subsidies, he told Radio-Canada, “something isn’t working.”
Christian Robitaille is the director general of Culture Capitale-Nationale–Chaudière-.Appalaches, a network of cultural organizations in the region. “After the pandemic, there was a moment of increased government investment in culture, but then it was the same as [in every other sector] … but in 2021-22, people started to realize how expensive everything was, and the pandemic-era support disappeared. We have pre-pandemic funding with post-pandemic costs,” he said. “There’s inflation, there are salary increases, philanthropy is harder in a complicated time… and there are more requirements being placed on cultural organizations, which are expensive to fulfil,” he said. “We can raise ticket prices, but there’s a limit to that.”
Grants from government agencies are shrinking amid budget cuts. Robitaille also said he fears that in the current economic context, artists themselves might leave the arts for other, more stable and lucrative fields. “We’re not demanding billions here, but the govern- ment needs to recognize the importance of the arts. We’re getting close to the limit.”
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